FW: Authoritative answer "no data" 50% of the time

[Barry Finkel]

admjcd at VOLPE.DOT.GOV wrote:

>I am a messaging administrator having a intermittent (50% of every
>day for a few hour intervals)  problem sending to a few sub domains
>at army.mil.  One of which is lee.army.mil.  Our DNS server is the
>only DNS server we can que ry behind our firewall.  It some-times gives
>the correct response when looking up the mx records for these
>domains.  and the other 50% of the time it retu rns this response:
>
>Query:All records (ALL):lee.army.mil
>Authoritative Answer
>Server has no data for this query
>
>However; if I direct dial the Internet and query any other DNS server I
>always (99.8%) get the correct response.  especially if I query all
>the NS servers listed for these domains. ns01.army.mil ns02.army.mil and
>ns03.army.mil

This is the same problem I reported a few days ago.  The feeling from
Mark Andrews was that the Army was not using BIND, as BIND would not
have incorrect counts in the section headers in the DNS packet.
The Army hides its version of DNS.  I have sent e-mails to 

     gcastro at nmsaims7.army.mil
     DOMAIN-REQUEST at AIMS7.army.mil

complaining about their DNS configurations, but I have not received
a recent response.  I did receive a response once from gcastro when
mail to the SOA e-mail address was undeliverable.  Maybe if others who
are having problems sending mail to the Army would complain, maybe
the DNS problem would get fixed.  But maybe the Army wants to get work
done instead of reading e-mail :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Electronics and Computing Technologies Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-9689
Building 221, Room B236              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4844             IBMMAIL:  I1004994